On the Latin Language

original: "ex solo Hieronymi indice notam referri possunt, Goetz coniecit Petrum sex libris servatis adnumerasse tres ad Septumium missos in ipso principio l. V commemoratos: eaque coniectura confirmatur ex similibus aliorum erroribus, de quibus Spengel praef.² p. IX quaedam composuit."
Since these can only be traced back to the index of Jerome, Goetz conjectured that Peter referring to Petrus Diaconus added to the six preserved books the three sent to Septumius, which are mentioned at the very beginning of Book V; and this conjecture is confirmed by similar errors of others, regarding which Spengel composed certain points in his preface 2nd ed., p. IX. Finally, one should not ignore the consensus of form between that codex, which exhibits the Varronian fragment along with Frontinus and Vegetius, and F itself; for both, as Keil already pointed out in his commentary on Spengel p. 434, are oblong in quarto, whereas otherwise in the codices of the monastery of Monte Cassino imperial-sized folios with two columns are customary. Since all these things agree so remarkably with one another, we can affirm, even more confidently than Keil, that Petrus Diaconus made his excerpts from the codex F itself at Monte Cassino, and that from there the same unique book was later transported to Florence.1 Nor does it cause us concern in this question that the same Spengel, who brought forward a most lucid argument for this matter, nonetheless decided loc. cit., p. 481 ff.—with the assent of Groth in his Strasbourg dissertation p. 81—that the fragment was drawn not from F itself, but rather from its source. He arrived at this conclusion primarily from one correction which he did not admit to be owed to conjecture, even though he himself conceded that the epitomizer must have been sufficiently learned, having prudently selected a most significant fragment from the brevity of the work (how much this agrees with the studies of Petrus Diaconus we have just explained). And he easily grants that conserunt they sow/connect for conserunt they connect original: "conse- runt and other things were acutely corrected by a learned man: and this is clearly apparent on p. 14, 15, where he supplied ibidem in the same place, even though only ibi there fits, and earlier Albano of the Albans—as Spengel also once did—beside the point. But the fact that on 15, 11 he exhibited aceleuibenna for Caele Vibenna for aceleuibenno for Caele Vibenna (dative), one can hardly believe that he restored the very rare Etruscan name on his own, but rather that it was taken from the exemplar. But even if we concede that Caele Vibenna himself was barely, if at all, known to the epitomizer—whom we can identify as Petrus Diaconus—nevertheless, from the analogy of very well-known names such as Perpenna and Spurinna—about which Varro speaks in these very books—Porsenna and others, he could spontaneously infer

1) In passing, we touch upon the fact that there is no lack of orthographic matters that appear to betray an Italian scribe. For example, the fact that oscur. obscure exists at 4, 15 before correction and 106, 11 without correction (cf. also istitutus incohatum instituted/begun 85, 11). Now, since Spengel pref. 2, p. VIII sq. not without reason opines that F provided diti for Diti rather than dicti spoken, it is not at all correctly recalled to Diti the god Dis (Pluto), which cannot be borne in any way: for it must be referred to the pronunciation by which later speakers said Otobrem October and similar. To which we add errors to be recalled to the sound of the letters g and j, such as ierusia for gerusia 47, 18 (cf. ierofante and gerofante hierophant similar) and 69, 10 abigebat for aiebat (from agiebat), and similar. Likewise the epitomizer at 17, 14 placed g for j, rightly accepting l for i in F (whence the corr. to the note). We will speak about other orthographic matters later.